Design and implementation of a froth size analysis system for mineral flotation based on DSP

Recently mineral froth flotation systems of machine-vision-based industrial computer platform have been applied, which greatly improve the working condition of flotation workers. Considering the drawback of these systems in simultaneously analyzing flotation froth size with multi-cameras, a distributed DSP-based analytic embed system is developed. The distributed structure of this system has designed subsystems to deal with image processing units, which can reduce the computational cost and improve the extensibility of system. In the system, TMS320DM642 chip is selected as the core processor. One kind of watershed algorithms is applied to analyze the froth sizes. Processed data are transmitted to industrial computer via Ethernet, which can be real-time analyzed and displayed. The industrial application results show its high accuracy of froth sizes and less computing times, which can meet the industrial requirements of analyzing froth size in mineral flotation.